Well, to be fair, i end up using the apps version of gmail for work far more than my regular account.

The most recent example dealt with a specific admin type email i needed for forms. it is an email with two fairly distinctive words. As far as i know, it's the only email i've ever received with those two words.

The top 20 emails returned by search don't contain both words.

perhaps this is a weird or unfair use case. There's a fair amount of institutional knowledge tucked away in that account. Often, i need complicated constraints to coerce the search to bring forth my data.

it's, okay, i guess. i find it odd it returns emails that don't contain all of my criteria first. I understand the desire for including more recent results. Probably, it's a lot more economical to not really search all my mail, and just provide a set from a recent pool of stuff.

Try subscribing to a high volume mailing list like bugtraq or linux-kernel. For a search to yield any meaningful results you have to add -label:bugtraq -label:linux-kernel. for. every. single. search. Still, for the other 99.9999% of users who don't subscribe to mailing lists I'm sure it's great.